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Idaho, and What Came After: Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville
The playwright best known for The Whale turns a critical eye on the art he’s made about his hometown.
Receiving its premiere at Signature Theatre under the direction of Jack Serio — a mentee of David Cromer, who, along with Davis McCallum, is one of a tiny handful of directors who have staged Hunter’s plays in New York — Grangeville tells the story of two estranged half-brothers brought up, of course, in the titular Idaho town. “Yeah, Mom’s trailer is a little — too close to home,” he snaps, then adds, with a sneer: “The sad thing is that diorama would probably bring in more money than anything I’ve made in the last ten years … You make little models of Dairy Queens and strip malls and rural highways, suddenly you’re critiquing late-stage American imperialism. Charlie, the professor at the center of his play The Whale(and recently an Oscar-winning role for Brendan Fraser, who was originally slated to appear in Grangeville as Jerry), was another such grim thought experiment: “That’s kind of a fun-house-mirror version of me if a few key things in my life hadn’t happened,” Hunter told the New York Times in 2019.
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